The more I look into what's happening in the mobile scene, the more excited I get. The smartphone platforms really are the computers of tomorrow. They all have big (enough) screens with touch, most of them have keyboards, connectivity is excellent with both wifi and high speed 3G (Rogers in Canada says it has 3.5G, even better). Heck, they're way more powerful than the PCs we fell in love with in the 80s.
I'm looking at this from an application developer's point of view. If you're a mobile app developer and you have a great idea, what platform do you target? And it's a pretty significant choice, just like it was in the 80's. All of the platforms have not only different APIs, but different programming languages. iPhone with Objective-C, Android with it's own version of Java, Palm Pre with JavaScript, RIM with J2ME, and Nokia with almost everything including Flash and C++. And then you have the Linux-based MIDs such as Moblin (need to mention my upcoming new bosses :)) and Maemo which are also starting to blur the line as they start acquiring 3G functionality. In theory, you'd love to get your idea on all these platforms.
But I'm really not sure how this is supposed to happen and that's one of the biggest challenges we have in the mobile market. I can see why these vendors want to keep their own identity. These SDKs are differentiating right now, at least until we get more apps in place. And they are fighting for the same market and would rather see developers build apps for their platform and not the other guys. So, I think it's up to the app developers to solve this, to give them bigger markets to sell into. We'll see how it pans out.
The good news is that, thanks to Eclipse, there is already a number of these vendors who have tooling based on Eclipse. Theoretically, you should be able to build an IDE that integrates all these tools together and least have a common development environment. And the Eclipse Pulsar mobile working group is working on making it easier to set this up.
There are some common technologies. I think all the platforms have Web Browsers that support Web 2.0 applications (and that's all Palm Pre seems to have). And since they all have full-time connectivity to the Internet, this seems like a reasonable choice. Also the newer platforms have 3D graphic support through the standard OpenGL ES API. That might be a good choice if you have a more graphics intensive application.
The one thing that crossed my mind is whether modeling has something to offer. People who know me will find that funny as I'm quite jaded from my days working on modeling tools. But Model Driven Development was intended to address this kind of problem. I think the biggest problem with MDD was poor modeling of behavior, a must in this domain, but you can't dismiss the potential of writing your app in a platform independent language and generating the implementations for each platform you want to support. Whoever comes up with that, and it'll be immensely expensive to build, will have a market of confused application developers to sell to.
Showing posts with label eclipse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eclipse. Show all posts
Friday, June 05, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
It's Android Time
Well, I've had a lot of fun trying different things with embedded Linux and creating simple platforms. The idea was to help hobbyists and students start using CDT for building embedded applications. We have the remote download and launcher (using RSE) and gnu cross compiler support in the upcoming CDT 6.0 to help make it a real force in this area.
That work was pretty much all on hobby time. And it was fun to see it working. But I was describing that the hobby was just like work just on my own time. And my wife make a point that really hit home, "yeah, it's like work but you don't get paid". Uh, yeah.
That and there are already a lot of platforms out there for hobbyists to get starting using Eclipse for embedded development. And one of those platforms has a Market place that allows you to sell the little apps that you can make. Hobby, that pays. Hmmm.
Of course, the platform I'm talking about is Android. It has a great set of Eclipse tooling for writing apps. Yes, it's Java, and yes I bash Java regularly. But it gets the job done. And I think I have something to offer Android. Myself and a few others out on the webisphere have figured out how to build JNI libraries for Android. That gives you the best of both worlds. JDT for Java, CDT for the native libraries. You probably only need native libraries for compute intensive tasks that you can use the underlying hardware to help accelerate. But at times that is a need.
And building native libraries is pretty easy. Do a google search for Android Build System and you'll see a general description of it and the special Android.mk file you need to provide. You need to build your library in a subdirectory under the Android source tree. But once it's there you can create a CDT project that points to it. "make mymodule showcommands" and you're off to the races. And CDT's scanner discovery will even pick out the include path from the gcc/g++ commands.
Now I'm not sure how the native libraries work on real devices. It may be prohibited due to security concerns. So I'd like to try it on one before I push the idea too far. Rogers up here in Canada is finally getting Android phones in June, the same ones as T-mobile. I'll have to invest in one and see. But going through the SDK docs, I am getting the feeling this will be pretty rewarding, in more ways than one ;)
So what does this mean for my work on Wascana, which also competes for my hobby time? I'm still keen on it, and my new strategy of "stealing" the RPM contents from Fedora will allow that to take less time. But it comes back to what I was saying in my previous blog entry. It's a big burden trying to promote CDT for Windows development. Sometimes I feel alone and I wonder if anyone really cares. It's a burden I'm getting tired of carrying. Hopefully someone will step up and help, or some vendor will come in and fund some of it. We'll see.
That work was pretty much all on hobby time. And it was fun to see it working. But I was describing that the hobby was just like work just on my own time. And my wife make a point that really hit home, "yeah, it's like work but you don't get paid". Uh, yeah.
That and there are already a lot of platforms out there for hobbyists to get starting using Eclipse for embedded development. And one of those platforms has a Market place that allows you to sell the little apps that you can make. Hobby, that pays. Hmmm.
Of course, the platform I'm talking about is Android. It has a great set of Eclipse tooling for writing apps. Yes, it's Java, and yes I bash Java regularly. But it gets the job done. And I think I have something to offer Android. Myself and a few others out on the webisphere have figured out how to build JNI libraries for Android. That gives you the best of both worlds. JDT for Java, CDT for the native libraries. You probably only need native libraries for compute intensive tasks that you can use the underlying hardware to help accelerate. But at times that is a need.
And building native libraries is pretty easy. Do a google search for Android Build System and you'll see a general description of it and the special Android.mk file you need to provide. You need to build your library in a subdirectory under the Android source tree. But once it's there you can create a CDT project that points to it. "make mymodule showcommands" and you're off to the races. And CDT's scanner discovery will even pick out the include path from the gcc/g++ commands.
Now I'm not sure how the native libraries work on real devices. It may be prohibited due to security concerns. So I'd like to try it on one before I push the idea too far. Rogers up here in Canada is finally getting Android phones in June, the same ones as T-mobile. I'll have to invest in one and see. But going through the SDK docs, I am getting the feeling this will be pretty rewarding, in more ways than one ;)
So what does this mean for my work on Wascana, which also competes for my hobby time? I'm still keen on it, and my new strategy of "stealing" the RPM contents from Fedora will allow that to take less time. But it comes back to what I was saying in my previous blog entry. It's a big burden trying to promote CDT for Windows development. Sometimes I feel alone and I wonder if anyone really cares. It's a burden I'm getting tired of carrying. Hopefully someone will step up and help, or some vendor will come in and fund some of it. We'll see.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Too few cooks
On Planet Eclipse we've had some harsh but healthy discussion on how Eclipse could be better organized for success. There are probably little things that need to be done, but at the end, I think the conclusion is that the Foundation staff are doing a pretty good job and Eclipse is organized to accomplish what it was intended to, to provide an open ecosystem for companies to work together on Eclipse platform technologies.
But I am still very worried about Eclipse. And the main problem I am seeing is that there are too few people making the wheels turn, especially as we push Galileo out the door. I figure if we removed probably 3 or 4 people from the equation, Galileo would stop dead in it's tracks and the release wouldn't happen. That is scary in my books. Even on the CDT, if I didn't do the countdown to releases, as I've done for the past 5 years or so, the CDT wouldn't release either. Or at the very least, someone else would have to jump in. And I won't even start with the e4 flexible resource project which currently has one part time guy actually doing code.
That's a pretty big burden for those few. And give the number of commercial vendors that rely on Eclipse technologies, I wonder if it's fair. The good news is that these few people have a lot of passion and are very focused on making Eclipse releases happen. So it will be a success. But understaffed projects is a chronic problem at Eclipse and that's where I fear it's future.
Maybe this fear comes from my own situation where I've been reduced to pretty much working on CDT in my hobby time plus a few hours here and there in my day job. But I know a lot of people in the same position and really wonder how we'll accomplish our goals in the upcoming year for Eclipse. That's the reality we need to figure out how to deal with and improve. Eclipse governance problems is incredibly minor compared to that.
But I am still very worried about Eclipse. And the main problem I am seeing is that there are too few people making the wheels turn, especially as we push Galileo out the door. I figure if we removed probably 3 or 4 people from the equation, Galileo would stop dead in it's tracks and the release wouldn't happen. That is scary in my books. Even on the CDT, if I didn't do the countdown to releases, as I've done for the past 5 years or so, the CDT wouldn't release either. Or at the very least, someone else would have to jump in. And I won't even start with the e4 flexible resource project which currently has one part time guy actually doing code.
That's a pretty big burden for those few. And give the number of commercial vendors that rely on Eclipse technologies, I wonder if it's fair. The good news is that these few people have a lot of passion and are very focused on making Eclipse releases happen. So it will be a success. But understaffed projects is a chronic problem at Eclipse and that's where I fear it's future.
Maybe this fear comes from my own situation where I've been reduced to pretty much working on CDT in my hobby time plus a few hours here and there in my day job. But I know a lot of people in the same position and really wonder how we'll accomplish our goals in the upcoming year for Eclipse. That's the reality we need to figure out how to deal with and improve. Eclipse governance problems is incredibly minor compared to that.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Eclipse is a Drug and other Musings
I haven't written anything here in the last few days and was starting to get the urge to write something, anything. I feel compelled to say something about Bjorn's impending departure from the Eclipse Foundation. But I'm not sure I have much to say. As I mentioned in a previous post, he wears his emotions on his sleeve at times so I wasn't particularly surprised. But I too have a sense of change at Eclipse having been involved for almost seven years now.
Maybe it's because I'm very part time on the CDT in my current job and miss working daily in the open. But I look around the CDT project and see the same is true for many of us. And yeah, the CDT has a lot of functionality today already and we're pretty much in maintenance mode. But there are some cool things we've started talking about, like introducing static code analysis capabilities, and the build system is in much need of a redo. I think there's enough there to generate excitement, I just wish I had more time to promote that. But we'll see what I can do anyway.
And that's the theme of this post. For most of us working on Eclipse, it is very much like a drug. I'm hooked on it. We see a lot of people leaving companies only to find them pop up at another company that also works on Eclipse. We've even seen high profile Eclipse people leave the safety of their mothership to strike out on their own as Eclipse consultants to continue to help feed the Eclipse ecosystem. Once you've been there, you understand why. There are so many good people and so many high profile companies involved at Eclipse, it's certainly a high to be working at it.
So I don't worry about Bjorn leaving. I know he's hooked too and won't go far ;).
BTW, just ran across a blog entry describing how to use the CDT for Linux programming with OpenGL, something I've started to focus on in my hobby time. The instructions are a bit out dated, and I should do some real webinar tutorials on how to do things like this. But I'm fixated on the blog because it has a music player embedded into it and is playing some of my favorite metal bands :). Cool blog marketing trick. BTW, blogging is a drug too ;)
Maybe it's because I'm very part time on the CDT in my current job and miss working daily in the open. But I look around the CDT project and see the same is true for many of us. And yeah, the CDT has a lot of functionality today already and we're pretty much in maintenance mode. But there are some cool things we've started talking about, like introducing static code analysis capabilities, and the build system is in much need of a redo. I think there's enough there to generate excitement, I just wish I had more time to promote that. But we'll see what I can do anyway.
And that's the theme of this post. For most of us working on Eclipse, it is very much like a drug. I'm hooked on it. We see a lot of people leaving companies only to find them pop up at another company that also works on Eclipse. We've even seen high profile Eclipse people leave the safety of their mothership to strike out on their own as Eclipse consultants to continue to help feed the Eclipse ecosystem. Once you've been there, you understand why. There are so many good people and so many high profile companies involved at Eclipse, it's certainly a high to be working at it.
So I don't worry about Bjorn leaving. I know he's hooked too and won't go far ;).
BTW, just ran across a blog entry describing how to use the CDT for Linux programming with OpenGL, something I've started to focus on in my hobby time. The instructions are a bit out dated, and I should do some real webinar tutorials on how to do things like this. But I'm fixated on the blog because it has a music player embedded into it and is playing some of my favorite metal bands :). Cool blog marketing trick. BTW, blogging is a drug too ;)
Monday, April 13, 2009
Fun with Qemu/Qt
Just for fun (and maybe profit), I thought I'd try and get Qt running on the mini ARM Linux setup that I used for my tutorial at EclipseCon. Low and behold, all I had to do was build it with the compiler I got from CodeSourcery for ARM and it worked!
Now there isn't a whole lot of magic here. It's using the Linux framebuffer device that draws to the screen. I'm not sure how it would look on a real device but it looked might fine on qemu. Here's a snapshot of it running on my laptop, which is now solidly Fedora. It's running the browser demo app and has loaded my blog just before I posted this. It took a little while to load and render, but again, it looked pretty good.
Having gotten this far, I start to wonder how much better it would be if I had OpenGL ES emulation in qemu. Would it be faster? Curiosity might kill this cat...
Now there isn't a whole lot of magic here. It's using the Linux framebuffer device that draws to the screen. I'm not sure how it would look on a real device but it looked might fine on qemu. Here's a snapshot of it running on my laptop, which is now solidly Fedora. It's running the browser demo app and has loaded my blog just before I posted this. It took a little while to load and render, but again, it looked pretty good.
Having gotten this far, I start to wonder how much better it would be if I had OpenGL ES emulation in qemu. Would it be faster? Curiosity might kill this cat...
Thursday, April 09, 2009
WolfenQt: Proof in pudding
An update to my previous post. As proof I got it working, here's my blog from earlier today. You can't see the flash since apparently the adobe flash player bypasses the widget set and opens a native window directly. Wonder where it showed up... At any rate, lots of fun. And with OpenGL mode turned on, performs quite nicely and the widgets are quite readable. Click on the picture to see full size. Very nice.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Widgets in 3D: WolfenQt
As the shiny balls spin around in my world, Qt has jumped back into the foreground. My Fedora laptop is busy building 4.5 as I write this and slowly catching on fire (man these things get hot when they're busy working). While that was going on, I took another look at how you'd implement Qt widgets in 3D space, kind of like Clutter does in a GTK fashion (mind you I think those are just static 2D images, not widgets).
Low and behold, I came across the Qt Lab Blog entry by someone there who actually has a demo of Qt widgets running in a maze similar to the old id games. He called it WolfenQt. Take a look here:
Very cool! This is exactly how I was hoping it would look and feel. And Qt has the framework to make it happen. I need to do some experimentation with it once I my 4.5 compiled to see how much of this is done in OpenGL versus software rendering. Looking at the code it looks like quite a mix of both. But from the video, it looks fast enough. And I do know the marching guy is rendered using OpenGL at least.
This is the kind of innovation I'd love to see. We talk a lot in the Eclipse world about Java thick clients and Browser/Server architectures. But there's still so much more you can do using native APIs that take advantage of all the new hardware acceleration capabilities that today's platform providers are giving us.
And the CDT is such a natural IDE for this new world. With all these new platforms, developers really need a cross platform cross target development environment to work with them all. The goal for my CDT work right now is to show that off and put together IDE packages, like Wascana and maybe something with DSDP for embedded, that can be used in these environments.
Low and behold, I came across the Qt Lab Blog entry by someone there who actually has a demo of Qt widgets running in a maze similar to the old id games. He called it WolfenQt. Take a look here:
Very cool! This is exactly how I was hoping it would look and feel. And Qt has the framework to make it happen. I need to do some experimentation with it once I my 4.5 compiled to see how much of this is done in OpenGL versus software rendering. Looking at the code it looks like quite a mix of both. But from the video, it looks fast enough. And I do know the marching guy is rendered using OpenGL at least.
This is the kind of innovation I'd love to see. We talk a lot in the Eclipse world about Java thick clients and Browser/Server architectures. But there's still so much more you can do using native APIs that take advantage of all the new hardware acceleration capabilities that today's platform providers are giving us.
And the CDT is such a natural IDE for this new world. With all these new platforms, developers really need a cross platform cross target development environment to work with them all. The goal for my CDT work right now is to show that off and put together IDE packages, like Wascana and maybe something with DSDP for embedded, that can be used in these environments.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
On the future of Eclipse
Another great post by Bjorn on life at Eclipse in the new world and a great follow up by Michael Scharf on his thoughts on major changes needed to get there. These two posts made me think about what I'd like to see as a way to take Eclipse forward into the future.
Bjorn draws up a nice, clean looking "architecture" on how the cycle of value feeds the Eclipse ecosystem. Committer -> Project -> Product -> Profit -> Committer... Unfortunately there's a week point in this cycle which I fear will blow the whole thing up, and that's the assumption that vendors making profit on Eclipse-based products will be compelled to fund Committers working on open source projects feeding those products. I've seen too many vendors in this position not do that.
It's frustrating to see so many products based on the CDT and less than half of them contribute back to improve the CDT. Maybe the existing committers have done so good a job that they don't have to. Or maybe they're not big enough to devote developers to the cause in a significant fashion to justify the cost. What ever the case, we all know how hard it to bring in new contributors. You need to "Create the Need" for them to come. It certainly isn't out of good will, especially in these times.
Assuming the cycle fails all together, how do we ensure Eclipse projects remain healthy with new contributions? Michael brings up a solution that I've wanted to see for a while. He brings it up from an architectural perspective, which is what he does :), but I bring it up from a political perspective. The members should fund a team of core developers to ensure critical Eclipse projects continue to grow. These developers would be vendor neutral other than to follow the wishes of the members. The Foundation can help co-ordinate this but it's really on the Eclipse membership to make it happen.
The best example of this I know is with the Linux Foundation where they state that one of their goals is "Protecting and Supporting Linux Development". Now Linus doesn't work for the Foundation, but the members do fund his work there to ensure he can continue to work full-time and independently on the kernel. I'm not sure how well this is working in practice, especially with people other than Linus. But it's worthy of a look.
Interestingly enough, a lot of the members of the Linux Foundation are also members of the Eclipse Foundation. But, would such a policy work at Eclipse?
Bjorn draws up a nice, clean looking "architecture" on how the cycle of value feeds the Eclipse ecosystem. Committer -> Project -> Product -> Profit -> Committer... Unfortunately there's a week point in this cycle which I fear will blow the whole thing up, and that's the assumption that vendors making profit on Eclipse-based products will be compelled to fund Committers working on open source projects feeding those products. I've seen too many vendors in this position not do that.
It's frustrating to see so many products based on the CDT and less than half of them contribute back to improve the CDT. Maybe the existing committers have done so good a job that they don't have to. Or maybe they're not big enough to devote developers to the cause in a significant fashion to justify the cost. What ever the case, we all know how hard it to bring in new contributors. You need to "Create the Need" for them to come. It certainly isn't out of good will, especially in these times.
Assuming the cycle fails all together, how do we ensure Eclipse projects remain healthy with new contributions? Michael brings up a solution that I've wanted to see for a while. He brings it up from an architectural perspective, which is what he does :), but I bring it up from a political perspective. The members should fund a team of core developers to ensure critical Eclipse projects continue to grow. These developers would be vendor neutral other than to follow the wishes of the members. The Foundation can help co-ordinate this but it's really on the Eclipse membership to make it happen.
The best example of this I know is with the Linux Foundation where they state that one of their goals is "Protecting and Supporting Linux Development". Now Linus doesn't work for the Foundation, but the members do fund his work there to ensure he can continue to work full-time and independently on the kernel. I'm not sure how well this is working in practice, especially with people other than Linus. But it's worthy of a look.
Interestingly enough, a lot of the members of the Linux Foundation are also members of the Eclipse Foundation. But, would such a policy work at Eclipse?
Sunday, April 05, 2009
The Rise of the User Community
I'm a big Bjorn fan. I've gotten to know him pretty well in my years of involvement with Eclipse. There is no mistaking his passion for open source communities and he's like me, he wears his emotions on his sleeve when things aren't going as well as they could. I'm really enjoying his series on the State of Eclipse. Most of his points I totally agree with based on my experience with CDT, e.g., the need for Diversity and the continuing battle between the User and Vendor communities over the need of an Eclipse product that users can count on, where as I stated in the comments, this is an area that is fundamentally broken at Eclipse.
However, I can't agree that his solution of relying on the members to provide free distributions of Eclipse to replace the distros available at eclipse.org, is the right solution. I'll go further and say it won't even work. As I also stated in the comments, the members that produce commercial IDEs do so in competition with the free distros from Eclipse.org. Making a free distro available from their web sites and supported by them makes no business sense, and knowing sales people as I do, they'll veto it immediately to protect their revenue. Some companies may differ and that's the only hope I see for it.
And there's another reason why the distros at eclipse.org are important. There is a growing list of large User companies that are beginning to contribute to Eclipse to support the free distribution with their user base. You'll notice that the CDT has committers from Google and Ericsson, both of which are examples of this. Without their contributions, the CDT would certainly be worse off. I also met with another such large vendor at EclipseCon who also promised as their developers get up to speed they'll be contributing.
For the CDT, this is the most promising area of growth in the contributor community, and these guys rely on the distros from Eclipse.org. I'm not about to shoot myself in the foot and even if the Foundation put a stop to this (which Mike assures us won't happen), I'd still make a C/C++ IDE available from the CDT store.
It's been a great debate and that's what's so great about open source communities. Everyone has the freedom to state their opinion, Bjorn included. Take advantage of that and think about what they are saying. You might find yourself changing your mind. But don't do it in this case ;).
However, I can't agree that his solution of relying on the members to provide free distributions of Eclipse to replace the distros available at eclipse.org, is the right solution. I'll go further and say it won't even work. As I also stated in the comments, the members that produce commercial IDEs do so in competition with the free distros from Eclipse.org. Making a free distro available from their web sites and supported by them makes no business sense, and knowing sales people as I do, they'll veto it immediately to protect their revenue. Some companies may differ and that's the only hope I see for it.
And there's another reason why the distros at eclipse.org are important. There is a growing list of large User companies that are beginning to contribute to Eclipse to support the free distribution with their user base. You'll notice that the CDT has committers from Google and Ericsson, both of which are examples of this. Without their contributions, the CDT would certainly be worse off. I also met with another such large vendor at EclipseCon who also promised as their developers get up to speed they'll be contributing.
For the CDT, this is the most promising area of growth in the contributor community, and these guys rely on the distros from Eclipse.org. I'm not about to shoot myself in the foot and even if the Foundation put a stop to this (which Mike assures us won't happen), I'd still make a C/C++ IDE available from the CDT store.
It's been a great debate and that's what's so great about open source communities. Everyone has the freedom to state their opinion, Bjorn included. Take advantage of that and think about what they are saying. You might find yourself changing your mind. But don't do it in this case ;).
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Putting on my Fedora
Well, I did it, I finally did it. I ordered a 320GB drive and set up a dual boot situation with my old Windows install and my spanking brand new Fedora 10 on the rest of the disk. So far so good. It wasn't a perfect process, including a 4 hour shrink of my NTFS partition. But I'm up and running. And I have an out to go back if things go bad, but I have a feeling I won't.
I have a Dell D830 and had to install the Broadcom wireless driver and the nVidia driver for my NVS 140M graphics chip. Now, since these aren't under open source licenses, you have to get them from other sources, in my case rpmfusion.org. This is part of what sets Fedora apart from Ubuntu. With Ubuntu, it's a lot easier to set this up. You know you can mix GPL and !GPL and it's OK ;). At any rate, I deal with it since I feel Fedora is a bit crisper, especially for those of us who think they know what they're doing.
So why would I bother doing this? With Eclipse, Windows is a pretty fine development environment. The command line environments there are abysmal, but that's why we work hard on ensuring that you can do all your work from inside Eclipse. But that's probably it. I want to get back into an environment where command line is king (I used HP and Sun workstations long before becoming a Windows developer) and get a better feeling for what development life is like there. That and as I've mentioned before here, Linux is just the best environment for building embedded Linux platforms which is my hobby as of late.
Anyway, we'll see how long I last here before running back to Windows. As I have it, it's not too far away just in case, just over there on /dev/sda1 and in a VM coming soon.
I have a Dell D830 and had to install the Broadcom wireless driver and the nVidia driver for my NVS 140M graphics chip. Now, since these aren't under open source licenses, you have to get them from other sources, in my case rpmfusion.org. This is part of what sets Fedora apart from Ubuntu. With Ubuntu, it's a lot easier to set this up. You know you can mix GPL and !GPL and it's OK ;). At any rate, I deal with it since I feel Fedora is a bit crisper, especially for those of us who think they know what they're doing.
So why would I bother doing this? With Eclipse, Windows is a pretty fine development environment. The command line environments there are abysmal, but that's why we work hard on ensuring that you can do all your work from inside Eclipse. But that's probably it. I want to get back into an environment where command line is king (I used HP and Sun workstations long before becoming a Windows developer) and get a better feeling for what development life is like there. That and as I've mentioned before here, Linux is just the best environment for building embedded Linux platforms which is my hobby as of late.
Anyway, we'll see how long I last here before running back to Windows. As I have it, it's not too far away just in case, just over there on /dev/sda1 and in a VM coming soon.
Monday, March 30, 2009
EclipseCon notes and git
Well, I'm back at my day job at Wind and am doing a little reflection on what happened last week at EclipseCon. Despite the rumored lower attendence, I met with pretty much as many people as I do every year, maybe even slightly more. And hopefully that'll translate into growth in the CDT community.
And I guess my talk on building communities was a little over the top on the subject of project "takers" that I had a number of people come up to me and apologize and offer to contribute in the future. I certainly didn't mean to offend or criticize. I just wanted to prepare project contributors that there are vendors and people who are happy to take your work for free and not give anything back. And, while that's frustrating, with open source licensing there's nothing you can really do about it but be mentally prepared to see it happen.
The one area where I saw a very interesting rise in momentum was with distributed version control at Eclipse and git in particular. It started with discussions at the councils on Sunday where it became obvious that we need significant community interest and willingness of the projects to drive this home to justify the significant cost to the Foundation. There were a couple of BOFs and panels that I missed but it sounds from Karl's post that the activity was significant enough for the Foundation to start putting a plan together. Very cool!
The more I talk to people and dig into it, I think git and DVCS in general is probably one of the most significant technologies driving change in the way we work on software development projects since objects invaded our world. As evidence of that, the thought of distributed source repositories opens the door to the IDE in the Cloud. The Cloud could be built around git repos and if I need to work disconnected, or work with command line tools, I just clone it onto my laptop and merge back later. And being the old "curmudgeon" C/C++ embedded tools guy, that's a significant admission...
And I guess my talk on building communities was a little over the top on the subject of project "takers" that I had a number of people come up to me and apologize and offer to contribute in the future. I certainly didn't mean to offend or criticize. I just wanted to prepare project contributors that there are vendors and people who are happy to take your work for free and not give anything back. And, while that's frustrating, with open source licensing there's nothing you can really do about it but be mentally prepared to see it happen.
The one area where I saw a very interesting rise in momentum was with distributed version control at Eclipse and git in particular. It started with discussions at the councils on Sunday where it became obvious that we need significant community interest and willingness of the projects to drive this home to justify the significant cost to the Foundation. There were a couple of BOFs and panels that I missed but it sounds from Karl's post that the activity was significant enough for the Foundation to start putting a plan together. Very cool!
The more I talk to people and dig into it, I think git and DVCS in general is probably one of the most significant technologies driving change in the way we work on software development projects since objects invaded our world. As evidence of that, the thought of distributed source repositories opens the door to the IDE in the Cloud. The Cloud could be built around git repos and if I need to work disconnected, or work with command line tools, I just clone it onto my laptop and merge back later. And being the old "curmudgeon" C/C++ embedded tools guy, that's a significant admission...
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